


Closing the Circle

by valkyriered



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Angst, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Gen, Post-Series, Team as Family
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-22
Updated: 2017-02-22
Packaged: 2018-09-26 04:19:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,536
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9862193
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/valkyriered/pseuds/valkyriered
Summary: The Paladins return home.





	

When they come back home, they’re battle-hardened and weary, and after being thoroughly tested by the Galaxy Headquarters for disease and microbes and stable mental health, they stumble back into the homes of their parents. Shiro and Keith follow Matt and Pidge and Commander Holt home and fall asleep on their couches and beds. Shiro doesn’t even cry when he finds out his grandparents died during his years in space— he just sleeps.  
  
Eventually Dr. Holt and Sam give up on ever sleeping in their own bed again, because it’s the only one large enough to hold all four of the kids without anyone falling off. None of them seem entirely comfortable with sleeping apart from the others in a place that has suddenly become unfamiliar. Even Sam holds his wife a little closer at night, curled together in Matt’s now-abandoned bed. They all share strange idiosyncrasies, where they stare out the windows just on the edge of too long in order to reassure themselves that they’re back home. They marvel over food that had once seemed standard, but now, incredibly, tastes of home.  
  
It doesn’t feel the same, though, without all five of the paladins. They call Lance and Hunk as often as possible, but it’s hard to muster up the energy to pick up the phone, and hearing each other’s tinny voices from far away only makes them feel more alone. Keith tries to talk to Hunk over the phone, but he just ends up miserably passing the phone call off to Pidge before going to press his face into Shiro’s shoulder.  
  
Hunk is lonely, too. It’s obvious. The mountains that he used to find comfort and solace in make him feel claustrophobic. The ocean that once calmed him only feels incredibly, achingly lonely. Losing the other paladins feels like shedding off a second skin, and he feels raw and vulnerable and stripped to the bone. His house, with only him and his father, feels empty and too quiet.  
  
And after so many years of homesickness, Lance comes back to a place that feels entirely unlike the one he remembers. His siblings are grown up now, with lives and schools and he aches for the brightness and warmth of the place in his memories. His house seems lonely, his mother older and tired. She doesn’t know what to do with the sudden reappearance of a son she’d lost, now jumpy and plagued with vivid nightmares.  
  
It’s not too long before they turn up on the doorstep of the Holts, Hunk first, then Lance. It’s a temporary measure— they all need to be together, though. Pidge cries upon being reunited with Hunk. When Lance shows up, Keith goes flying out the door to tackle him to the ground. Sam and Dr. Holt’s bed becomes a little more crowded.  
  
The government had presented all of them with a sizable lump sum of money, and they’d left it untouched thus far. It was more zeroes than any of them had ever seen in their lives, and frankly, was a little intimidating. They don’t quite know what to do with it, up until they’re laying outside in the grass one afternoon, and Keith quietly suggests getting a home together. Nothing big, or ostentatious— but a home with plenty of land and green fields, and five separate rooms with large windows so they can see sky.  
  
The land is important to all of them. Sometimes it’s still hard to figure out where they are, and Shiro had developed a tendency to stumble outside during his flashbacks, and dig his fingers in the earth and breathe in the smell of it, and Sam would come outside and rub his back until he could breathe again. It became a coping mechanism that they’d all adopted. No matter how many planets they’d been to, how many wonders they’d seen, nothing smells as green as the grass or as dark and deep as the ground beneath them. The scent and feel of dust crumbling between their fingers tells them, instantly, that they’re home.  
  
They have a garden in their new house, sprawling across the front yard where there’s plenty of sunlight. It’s disorganized and not terribly neat-looking, but it’s filled with every kind of flower and fruit that they found interesting and would grow. Hunk has a vegetable patch that he regularly plucks ingredients from, and the straight, perfectly-labeled rows look entirely out of place in their winding mess of a garden. Lance insists on planting dandelions, despite protests that they’re a weed. This is their Earth garden, he argues. And what reminds him of Earth is dandelions. The golden yellow of them dot the ground all along the front yard, and the other paladins do their best to keep them away from the other plants.  
  
They sort through magazines and websites and pick out their furniture and paint and curtains. Hunk and Lance spearhead the decorating process, selecting fold-out couches with five-star comfort ratings, and carpets so thick that their feet sink right into them. They buy an ergonomic desk chair for Pidge and a telescope for Keith, and a set of lawn chairs for Shiro that they put in the yard so he can bask in the afternoon sun. Everything in the house is designed for maximum comfort, and they splurge on a set of massive beanbag chairs, one for each of them. They overstuff the bookshelves with books of every kind, and buy a television set large enough to rival a small movie theatre.  
  
It feels almost idyllic, and it would look it too if not for the bottles lined up along the bathroom sinks, labeled for anti-anxiety and anti-depressants, an alphabet soup of cocktails to help them function day-to-day. They all do their part in making sure that the others take them, dutifully dry-swallowing them before brushing their teeth every morning. There’s first-aid kits under the sinks, and the drawers and cabinets have bits of foam on the insides so they won’t slam shut and startle anyone.  
  
The winding driveway and tall trees keep them relatively protected from the outside world, and they avoid things like grocery shopping by ordering anything they really need. Somewhere along the line, the controlled chaos of a grocery store became too much for any of them. Sometimes Pidge’s parents and brother will stop by with various supplies, and will help them out with any work they need to do around the house. Hunk’s father comes by as often as he can make it to the mainland, and Lance’s parents, whenever they’re in the area, try to visit. It’s a little strange to have family around, and they all breathe a sigh of relief when it goes back to just being the five of them.  
  
They’re strange and codependent. They have no interest in anyone else beyond the tightly-huddled pack of the five of them. They’re untrusting and hurt and in desperate need of comfort and familiarity. The newspapers call them a wolf-pack and they don’t dispute it. When reporters cluster at the end of their drive they ignore them, and whenever one of them decides to come up the drive Shiro stalks out of the house and threatens them until they leave. He’s increasingly protective, and only once makes the mistake of actually hurting a trespassing journalist. Afterwards, he goes in the house and goes to bed, and Hunk takes care of guiding the injured man off the property.  
  
None of the reporters make that mistake again.  
  
The connection is still there, although weaker now without the lions, relegated to the backs of their minds. It flares at strange times, letting them know when someone is frightened or laughing particularly hard at something on the television. They all grow accustomed to brief snatches of words and emotions from each other throughout the day. Sometimes at night, they’ll lay a blanket out in the yard and pile onto it and stare at the stars, and it almost feels like forming Voltron again. They allow themselves to be hypnotized by the night sky and enjoy the tangle of minds and limbs. Despite what they’ve lost, they can still feel each other.  
  
And when someone has a bad day, when they won’t get out of bed, when all they can do is stare dully into the distance and breathe short, ragged breaths, the other ones climb into bed with them. They give them their pills and some water and some food if they think they can keep it down, and they open the windows so they can smell the earth and taste the air. They point out the clouds crawling across the sky and the mountains in the distance. They bring them some flowers and leaves from the garden. And eventually, if they feel up to it, they take them outside.  
  
And it’s scary. And the world is big, and strange, and different than they left it. But there is soft ground beneath them and the sky above them is the same one they grew up being cradled by. There are more worlds out there than they ever knew, more than they could ever imagine. But they’re home. They’re home, and they’re safe.  
  
And it’s enough.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> lol oops
> 
> edit: I have a fandom sideblog now at: https://queenvallkyrie.tumblr.com/


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